Quirinus - Research Article from Encyclopedia of Religion

QUIRINUS. The god Quirinus was originally one of the main Roman divinities. The priest responsible for his cult was one of the three major flamines, along with the flamines of Jupiter and Mars, who outranked him in the ordo sacerdotum, the order of precedence of the most important priests (Festus 299 L). These three gods (Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus) made up the early triad that Georg Wissowa (1912, p. 23) has reconstructed from various features of ancient Roman life, such as the invocation of these three deities in the practice of devotio, in which a leading Roman offered his life to ensure victory against the enemy (Livy, 8.9.6); the law, attributed to the king Numa Pompilius, which differentiated between three kinds of booty according to the rank of the person who seized the booty from the enemy leader and who allocated it in different amounts to each of the three gods (Festus...